Renaissance

• 1. Introduction

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  Around 1440, from a single print shop in Mainz, Germany, a machine began throwing off pages by the hundred. Within sixty years that movable-type press had reached some 270 cities across Central, Western, and Eastern Europe. By the end of the 15th century it had produced more than 20 million volumes. The Renaissance was a European period of history and cultural movement at the close of the Late Middle Ages and the start of the early modern era. It is defined variously, sometimes as stretching from the 14th century to the 17th, sometimes more narrowly as the 15th and 16th. The Greek philosopher Protagoras had once said that man is the measure of all things, and that idea now returned with force. So why did this rediscovery of classical antiquity ignite first in the Republic of Florence, and not elsewhere? What did people of the time think was happening to them? And was it truly a rebirth, or something historians would later quarrel over for centuries?

• 2. Why Florence

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  Leonardo, Botticelli, and Michelangelo were all born in Tuscany, and some historians have explained Florence as the cradle of the movement simply through luck, because Great Men happened to be born there by chance. Others found that explanation improbable and pointed instead to the conditions that let such men rise. The Medici, a banking family who later became a ducal ruling house, sit at the center of those conditions. Lorenzo de Medici, who lived from 1449 to 1492, drove an enormous amount of arts patronage. He urged his countrymen to commission works from Florence's leading artists, among them Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Michelangelo Buonarroti. The Convent of San Donato in Scopeto in Florence commissioned works from Neri di Bicci, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Filippino Lippi. One precise starting point has even been proposed for the whole period: the year 1401, when the rival geniuses Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi competed for the contract to build the bronze doors of the Baptistery of the Florence Cathedral. Ghiberti won. Yet the movement was already underway before Lorenzo de Medici came to power, and indeed before the Medici family achieved hegemony in Florentine society at all.

• 3. The Weight Of The Dead

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  Between 1348 and 1350 the Black Death swept across Europe, and Florence's population was nearly halved in the single year of 1348. The plague was carried by fleas on sailing vessels returning from the ports of Asia, spreading fast where sanitation was poor. England, then home to about 4.2 million people, lost 1.4 million to the bubonic plague. One theory holds that this familiarity with death pushed thinkers in 14th-century Italy to dwell more on their lives on Earth than on the afterlife. Another argues the opposite, that the devastation prompted a new wave of piety expressed through the sponsorship of religious art. The economic aftershock reshaped ordinary lives. With so many dead, the value of the working class rose, and commoners came to enjoy more freedom. Food prices dropped, and land values fell by 30 to 40 percent across most of Europe between 1350 and 1400. Landholders faced great loss, but for ordinary men and women it was a windfall, and many inherited property from dead relatives. The plague did not, however, explain everything, since it ravaged all of Europe and not Italy alone. Even so, Florence's government did not collapse. Formal meetings of elected representatives were suspended at the height of the epidemic, yet a small group of officials was appointed to conduct the city's affairs and keep its government running.

• 4. Cities Without A Country

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  Italy did not exist as a political entity in the early modern period. It was divided into smaller city-states and territories, with the Neapolitans in the south, the Florentines and Romans at the center, the Milanese and Genoese to the north and west, and the Venetians to the north east. The German bishop Otto of Freising, who lived from about 1114 to 1158, visited north Italy in the 12th century and noticed something new. Society there appeared to have exited from feudalism, organized instead around merchants and commerce. That observation, recorded by the historian Quentin Skinner, points to the unusual climate that some believe allowed a rare cultural flowering. Anti-monarchical thinking found its picture in The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, a fresco cycle painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti between 1338 and 1340, with its message about fairness, justice, republicanism, and good administration. Venice was Europe's gateway to trade with the East and a producer of fine glass, while Florence was a capital of textiles. Merchants there brought ideas from far corners of the globe, particularly the Levant, turning trading cities into intellectual crossroads. The wealth such business generated meant large public and private artistic projects could be commissioned, and individuals had more leisure time for study. Matteo Palmieri, who lived from 1406 to 1475, celebrated not only Florentine art and architecture but the remarkable efflorescence of moral, social, and political philosophy that occurred in the city at the same time.

• 5. Recovering The Ancients

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  Coluccio Salutati, who lived from 1331 to 1406, sent an invitation in 1396 to the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, asking him to come teach Greek in Florence. That moment is usually taken as the start of returning Greek literary, historical, oratorical, and theological texts to the Western curriculum. Humanist scholars had a particular hunger. In contrast to the High Middle Ages, when Latin scholars focused almost entirely on Greek and Arabic works of natural science, philosophy, and mathematics, these scholars wanted Latin and Greek literary and historical works. The Latin phase came first, in the 14th century. Petrarch, along with Niccolo de Niccoli, who lived from 1364 to 1437, and Poggio Bracciolini, who lived from 1380 to 1459, scoured Europe's libraries for works by Cicero, Lucretius, Livy, and Seneca. By the early 15th century most of the surviving Latin literature had been recovered, and the Greek phase began. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 generated a wave of emigre Greek scholars carrying precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West. Works by Homer, the Greek dramatists, Demosthenes, and Thucydides had not been studied in the Latin or medieval Islamic worlds, surviving instead among Byzantine scholars. Some of that Greek thought had also passed west by another road. Muslim logicians, most notably Avicenna and Averroes, had inherited Greek ideas, and their translations worked through Iberia and Sicily, where schools like the Toledo School of Translators carried philosophy and science from Classical Arabic into Medieval Latin.

• 6. The Measure Of Man

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  Renaissance humanism was not so much a philosophy as a method of learning. Where the medieval scholastic mode tried to resolve contradictions between authors, humanists studied ancient texts in their original languages and judged them by reasoning and empirical evidence. Their education rested on the Studia Humanitatis, the study of five humanities: poetry, grammar, history, moral philosophy, and rhetoric. Above all they asserted the genius of man, the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola gave this conviction its sharpest voice in De hominis dignitate, the Oration on the Dignity of Man, written in 1486 as a series of theses on philosophy, natural thought, faith, and magic defended on the grounds of reason. The goal was a universal man, the uomo universale, whose person combined intellectual and physical excellence and who could function honorably in nearly any situation. Matteo Palmieri pursued that ideal in Della vita civile, On Civic Life, printed in 1528, which advocated civic humanism and helped refine the Tuscan vernacular to the level of Latin. He composed it as dialogues set in a country house in the Mugello countryside outside Florence during the plague of 1430, drawing especially on Cicero, who like Palmieri had lived an active public life. The polymath Leonardo da Vinci embodied the same breadth. He set up controlled experiments in water flow, medical dissection, and the systematic study of movement and aerodynamics, devising principles of research method that led Fritjof Capra to call him the father of modern science.

• 7. A Window Into Space

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  Giotto di Bondone, who lived from 1267 to 1337, is credited with first treating a painting as a window into space. The technique was not formalized until Filippo Brunelleschi, who lived from 1377 to 1446, demonstrated linear perspective, and Leon Battista Alberti, who lived from 1404 to 1472, set it down in writing. Realism spread from there. Painters studied light and shadow, and Leonardo da Vinci famously studied human anatomy, with the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael standing as pinnacles much imitated by others. In the Low Countries a vibrant culture grew alongside Italy's. The Flemish brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck perfected the oil painting technique, which let artists produce strong colors on a hard surface that could survive for centuries, and that influenced painting in Italy both technically and stylistically. Brunelleschi turned the same classical hunger toward buildings, studying the remains of ancient structures and drawing on the 1st-century writer Vitruvius. His major feat of engineering was building the dome of Florence Cathedral. Architects of the period treated columns, pilasters, and entablatures as an integrated system, and one of the first buildings to use pilasters that way was the Old Sacristy, built by Brunelleschi between 1421 and 1440. The High Renaissance produced no greater architectural work than the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, which combined the skills of Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, Sangallo, and Maderno.

• 8. Naming An Age

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  In the 1330s, Petrarch called the pre-Christian past antiqua, ancient, and the Christian era nova, new. From his Italian vantage this new period, his own included, was an age of national eclipse. Others soon built whole frameworks out of such labels. Leonardo Bruni was the first to use a three-part periodization in his History of the Florentine People in 1442, adding a third period to Petrarch's two because he believed Italy was no longer in decline. Humanist historians argued that their own scholarship restored direct links to the classical period, bypassing the era in between, which they named for the first time the Middle Ages. The term first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas, middle times. The word for rebirth itself arrived later. Rinascita appeared in its broad sense in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, published in 1550 and revised in 1568, where Vasari divided the age into three phases, the last centering on Leonardo da Vinci and culminating with Michelangelo. The French word renaissance gained popularity only in the 19th century. The French historian Jules Michelet, who lived from 1798 to 1874, defined it as an entire historical period in his 1855 Histoire de France, seeing it more as a development in science than in art, spanning from Columbus to Copernicus to Galileo. Not everyone has accepted the frame. The historian Randolph Starn of the University of California Berkeley wrote in 1998 that the Renaissance might be seen less as a period with definitive beginnings and endings than as a network of diverse, sometimes converging, sometimes conflicting cultures, to which different people in different times and places variously responded.